Pasta Shapes
Oretta Zanini De Vita, who spent a decade cataloguing Italian pasta for her encyclopedia, counted roughly 1,300 names for about 300 distinct shapes, and every one of them exists for a reason. A shape is a tool. It was designed, usually by someone's grandmother in a specific valley, to hold a specific sauce made from whatever that valley had. Once you understand the handful of principles behind that design, the wall of pasta at a good shop stops being decorative and starts being useful.
This guide is not about how pasta is made; we covered that in our piece on bronze-die pasta and our producer guides to Rustichella d'Abruzzo and Pastificio Gentile. This one answers the question people actually ask: which shape do I buy for the sauce I am making tonight, and why.
The five principles
Surface area to sauce. A thin strand has little surface, so it wants a sauce that coats rather than clings: olive oil, garlic, a light tomato sauce. A thick strand or a ridged tube has more surface and more texture, so it can carry something heavier.
Weight to weight. Delicate shapes go with delicate sauces. Sturdy shapes go with meat, cream and cheese. A ragù on angel hair collapses; a light herb sauce on rigatoni gets lost inside the tubes.
Holes and ridges are for catching. Ridges (rigate) grip; hollow shapes trap; cups and ears scoop. A sauce with pieces in it, sausage, greens, chickpeas, wants a shape with somewhere for the pieces to go.
Twists are for pesto. Corkscrews and spirals hold an emulsified sauce in their grooves better than any other geometry, which is why fusilli, trofie and busiate are the pesto shapes across Italy.
Rough beats smooth. A bronze-die pasta has a matte, porous surface that sauce adheres to. A Teflon-extruded pasta is glossy and sauce slides off. Every shape on our shelf is bronze-drawn, which means the principles above work as intended.
Long shapes
Spaghetti and linguine are the everyday strands, and they take everything from aglio e olio to clams. Linguine, slightly flattened, has a touch more surface and is the classic for seafood and pesto in Liguria. Marella's rainbow linguine, colored with vegetables, is the version to serve to children and to adults who are still children.
Bucatini is thick spaghetti with a hole through the middle, and the hole is not decorative: it fills with sauce and makes each bite juicier. It is the pasta of Rome's amatriciana, guanciale, tomato and pecorino, and it is equally correct with cacio e pepe or a simple butter and cheese. Rustichella's bucatini is the one to keep at home.
Tubes
Penne, rigatoni, paccheri. Tubes are for sauces with body: ragù, sausage and tomato, baked pasta, anything with cream. Ridged penne holds more than smooth, and Rustichella's penne rigate is the default for arrabbiata, vodka sauce and any baked dish. The rule with tubes is to match the size of the tube to the size of what is in the sauce; chunks of sausage belong in rigatoni, not penne.
Twists and spirals
Fusilli is the pesto shape, and its grooves hold any emulsified or chopped sauce: pesto, a chunky tomato sauce, a tuna and caper sauce, a pasta salad dressing. Rustichella's fusilli is tightly wound and holds its bite; their fusilli col buco, a long hollow corkscrew from Campania, is the shape for a sauce you want to twirl and trap at the same time. Busiate is Sicily's version, from Trapani, traditionally rolled around a knitting needle, and it exists for pesto alla trapanese, the almond, tomato and basil pesto of the west of the island; Morelli's busiate trapanesi is the bag to buy alongside a jar of almonds.
Strozzapreti, the "priest stranglers" of Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany, are hand-rolled twists with an open groove, and they are the shape for a rustic sauce with texture: sausage and greens, a mushroom ragù, brown butter and sage. Rustichella's strozzapreti chew like fresh pasta. Torchio, the "press" or trumpet shape, is a wide flared tube with a twist, built to hold cream and cheese sauces and chunky vegetable ragùs; Rustichella's torchio is the one to use with a dried mushroom sauce.
Cups, ears and leaves
Orecchiette, the "little ears" of Puglia, are shallow cups with a rough outside and a smooth inside, made to catch pieces. The canonical dish is orecchiette con cime di rapa, broccoli rabe wilted with garlic, anchovy and chile, often with crumbled sausage, and the cups scoop up the greens in a way no strand can. Rustichella's orecchiette is the plain, correct version; Marella's multicolor orecchiette, from a family workshop in Puglia that hand-shapes and naturally colors its pasta, is the same idea for a table that wants to look at its food.
Foglie d'ulivo, olive-leaf pasta, is another Puglian shape, pressed thin and colored green with spinach, and it behaves like a small, curved sheet: it takes pesto, light tomato sauces and olive oil with cherry tomatoes and ricotta salata. Marella's foglie d'ulivo is the shape people photograph before they cook it. Straccetti, "little rags," are irregular torn ribbons that pretend to be fresh pasta and take a rustic ragù or a sauce of butter, walnuts and pecorino; Marella's straccetti are the version.
Bows
Farfalle and their relatives are pinched in the middle, which means they cook unevenly by design: the pinch stays firm while the wings soften. They take lighter sauces, cream with peas and prosciutto, a pasta salad, a simple butter and Parmigiano. Rustichella's farfalloni are the large version for a substantial cream sauce; Marella's striped farfalline, colored with squid ink, are the small version for a soup or a seafood sauce that wants to look dramatic.
The one that is not really pasta
Fregola is Sardinia's answer to couscous: pellets of semolina rolled by hand and toasted in the oven, which gives them a nutty flavor and a chew that survives simmering. It is cooked in broth like a risotto or a soup, not boiled and drained, and the classic is fregola with clams, tomato and saffron. Rustichella's toasted fregola is also excellent cold in a salad with roasted vegetables, or simmered in a pot of beans during the last fifteen minutes.
Cooking habits that matter more than the shape
Salt the water like the sea, about a tablespoon per quart; the pasta absorbs it and cannot be seasoned properly afterward. Do not add oil to the water; it makes the surface slippery and defeats the bronze die. Cook a minute less than the package says, then finish the pasta in the pan with the sauce and a ladle of the starchy cooking water, tossing hard, which emulsifies the sauce onto the pasta. That final minute, the mantecatura, is what separates a restaurant plate from a home one. Sauce the pasta; do not drown it. Italians use far less sauce than Americans expect, and the shape is doing the rest of the work.
Cheat sheet
- Oil, garlic, chile, anchovy: spaghetti or linguine.
- Amatriciana, carbonara, cacio e pepe: bucatini.
- Pesto: fusilli, busiate, foglie d'ulivo.
- Ragù or sausage and tomato: penne rigate, torchio, strozzapreti.
- Greens with garlic and chile: orecchiette.
- Cream: farfalloni, torchio.
- Broth, clams, soup: fregola, farfalline.
- Anything with pieces: a cup, a tube or a groove, never a strand.
Where to start
A bag of bucatini, a bag of penne rigate, a bag of fusilli and a bag of orecchiette cover nine sauces in ten. Add fregola when you want a different texture and one Marella shape for the evening you want the table to notice. Everything is in our pasta collection beside the olive oils that finish it, and it ships nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com, or come stand in front of the wall at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver.
